ParanoidDrone

I don't suppose there's a particular reason my own version of the update was 4 gigs?

Oh my god yes. Mother 3 is also fantastic and is one of the few games that made me cry.

I've heard some people say they'd like to form a team again, although where we'd compete is beyond me. I've also heard that I did a good job of organizing our old Highlander team, despite my own feelings to the contrary. That said, I simply have too much on my plate to reasonably take responsibility for playing at team secretary again. tl;dr there's interest but I won't be the one to organize it again and have no idea what we'd actually do.

No excuse for me not being ingame much, just schoolwork out the ass and bizarre sleep patterns.

Who does that anymore? (Especially since you can disable HTML ones.)

I think it was a combination of the first Spy having the situational awareness of a brick and the second Spy not doing anything. I honestly think he was trying to backstab with the Sapper. (Also he was completely undisguised, etc.)

Finally. I was getting tired of the Halloween menu. Unrelated: In an attempt to figure out what's causing my ping issues, I discovered that checking the servers through Steam before opening TF2 yielded more standard ping levels. So I told my antivirus to ignore everything in my TF2 folder. This was last night, and except for a few seconds at the beginning of each map, it ran pretty smoothly. So...yay? Even more unrelated: There is very little in the world that can make my soul hurt as much as watching our Spy in the deathcam attempt to snipe across Nucleus while an undisguised enemy Spy walks up with the Sapper, stands behind our own Spy, and walks away without doing anything. True story.

*FF victory music*

Alltalk is supposed to be on. Haven't been ingame much lately -- was it not enabled earlier?

AFAIK if you stay on Loot Island too long after the cage disappears around the Bombnomicon, the game kills you anyway.

<late to the party> Since escaping the underworld and Loot Island rewards you with Uber, Critboost, a speed buff, and (I think) an HP buff, killing players to prevent them from doing such constitutes a tactical decision IMO. This is only marginally a dick move on Loot Island, which gives you the Dive Into A Good Book achievement, which in turn gives you the Bombnomicon item, the first time you escape. Also of note is the medium HP pack in the underworld directly adjacent to two pumpkin bombs, which AFAIK is sufficient to kill all classes -- risk/reward. Thus I am against making such a policy. Re: Killing people while they're occupied with Monoculous, I couldn't care less either way. </late to the party>

It's times like this when I'm glad I'm not the one responsible for managing the server.

Couldn't we use the IP?

TEST seems to have crashed. Lost the connection just now on Doublecross, 4 players total were on at the time. (One had just joined.)

I usually take advantage of quickplay, although it's had a distressing tendency to send me to empty servers lately. And several times it sent me to a server with 3 bots per team and no one else. (Protip: Valve servers all have the "valve" tag on them in the server browser. Filter by that and "has users playing" for some easy-yet-infuriating rounds courtesy of teammates with the collective intelligence of a brick.) Then there's the whole lolinternet thing where my ping soars into the 900 range and makes powerpoint look fast by comparison.

This is probably a good idea.

I love several things about this update: -Team specific nobuild at the forward spawn ledge on Gorge/5Gorge. Gamemaster will probably find a way around it, but it should restrict him to placing his stuff at the very edge of the platform if nothing else. -HOUWAR animations. "Finally." -Laundry list of changes to Spy bots. I don't know why I find it so funny but I do. Also yay Gullywash is official now.

I love how I'm a "Legendary Creature."

So I won't need to shut up while cloaked? Or is this the colored box in the HUD that tells you the speaker's name?

I don't know if it happened to anyone else, but I lost my connection to the test server last night while we were on Hydro. Lasted long enough to drop me altogether and wait a little for it to reappear in the server browser. I think it happened to one of the ZUZ guys too, but I can't remember who. There were two when I got dropped and only one when I got back.

My flamethrower brings all the boys to the yard. And they're like, "It's hotter than yours." Damn right, it's hotter than yours. I could Spycheck, but I'd have to charge.

Link for the curious. There was another custom map that I had really liked, cp_upland. It's a Steel-type CP map with a metric fuckton of vertical play going on, especially at B and C. Link.

No complaints with the test server from me. Had a smooth connection, with lower ping to boot.

Edited my post, might want to check that out too.

My connection's been improving lately except when it doesn't and decides to disconnect for some reason. I blame Comcast. (On a side note, wonky connections make it REALLY hard to tell if any lag you get is caused by the server or something on your end.) I'm fine with whatever you decide to do with the server, but you probably guessed that. In other news, the TF2 Beta updated with some changes to the Pyro's various flamethrowers. The stock Flamethrower got +10% damage. The Backburner lost its +10% damage bonus because of this, although it does the same DPS. The Degreaser lost its -25% afterburn penalty, but got a new -10% damage penalty to keep it on par with its damage in TF2 proper. EDIT: Also a new sever cvar: tf_allow_taunt_switch <0, 1, 2>. 0 disables it, 1 permits it at the start of your taunt only, 2 permits it at any time during the taunt (once per taunt only). Proof.